by Keniwuru Merutepiaou

Growing up in Meritah, most of us were strategically and systematically stripped away from our indigenous culture. We were then introduced to a fully colonial-backed education. In my case, as someone from Uganda, a former British colony, we took on what we have come to know as the ‘servant education’, which was reserved for people who worked under the administration of that particular colonial master. In this case, this education was structured to prepare people who were to serve under the British masters. Sixty-plus years after Uganda’s supposed independence, this type of education has mostly remained the same. Efforts to change it have always failed owing in part to the fact that our government still gets a lot of development aid from the former colonial masters, Europe and now America. This being so, the aid always comes with strings attached, one such being that we have to maintain a certain type and pedagogy of education. 

This background is important in starting to understand why, individually and as a society in general, we find ourselves in an identity crisis. The colonial master came and defined what and how to approach reality. Being educated in their ways, learning to speak their language and generally socializing in a form that reflected how they wanted us to. This has left us in a position of subservience. We were educated into believing that what is foreign is right and modern, and what we had as our tradition and culture was wrong, backward and outdated. This included our way of life, our language and how we relate with the Divine World. They stripped away that knowledge system and those hierarchies. This opened the gate for self-hate, which became our reality, opening the doors for identity crisis and self-sabotage. In fact, with time, we became the soldiers that fight against our indigenous culture.

The human mind cannot create; it can only copy. This being the case, because we have been educated by a foreign system, we can only relate and associate in the way we have been indoctrinated by that system.  But because we came from an established culture, this brought our psyche into conflict. For instance, along with the colonizers bringing us their education, they also brought us their religions (Christianity and Islam). In Meritah, every society (tribe or clan) already had established systems of relating with the Divine World, nature and the invisible forces. They all had an established culture. Later came the foreigner who taught that these forms of worship were demonic – a concept most indigenous societies did not even recognise. They claimed our language, music and entire lifestyle belonged to savages. Now we had to contend with what we knew to be culturally true and what the foreign master told us were modern truths. It's also a fact that in many cases the custodians of the traditional ways (priests and elders) were prosecuted and persecuted, many even facing death. This introduced the element of fear among the indigenous people to even associate with anything that had to do with our traditional culture.